The total number of January 2016 releases that I might be able to sit through without too much difficulty is…uhm, three. Okay, make it four. But really only two. I’m talking about (a) a pair of actioners about tough guys doing the rugged heroism thing, (b) what appears to be just another stupid, vulgar boner comedy, and (c) a troubled western that probably isn’t much good but you never know. Be optimistic.

The only 2016 commercial release that I damn well know will be good if not excellent in a droll, understated way and which I’m expecting to see next month (even though it won’t open until February 5th) is Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Hail Caesar!

The safest January bets are Michael Bay‘s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Bengahzi (Paramount, 1.15) and Craig Gillespie‘s The Finest Hours (Disney, 1.29). Neither will offer much in the way of thematic undercurrents, but at least they’re dealing with real-life events and will therefore need to deliver the goods in an “execution dependant” way.

I expect competency, at least, from Bay’s film, which is about that 9.11.12 mob attack upon an American compound in Benhgazi that resulted in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith. Will Bay include a line or even a scene that points the finger at then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for not having done all she could to prevent this disaster? Seems doubtful. Bay is primarily a technician. He’s never come within 100 yards of political content in his previous films. He just wants to ride the smooth seas.

And then there’s Dan Mazer‘s Dirty Grandpa (Lionsgate, 1.22), which costars Zac Efron and Robert DeNiro and may, I suspect, turn out to be oddly likable. No predictions, just a hunch. Because DeNiro has lately been on a kind of roll.

Since my late teens I’ve never been sick for more than a 48-hour period. Okay, 72 if you’re talking first symptoms to full recovery. This damn thing I have now has been going since last Tuesday night, for God’s sake. Conditions are somewhat better today as I’m at least strong enough to tap out a few items. “You’re all alone with what goes on inside your body” — a line from Olivier Assayas‘ Late August, Early September. (Hat tip to Joe Leydon’s 7.7.99 review.)

My illness didn’t really kick in until Wednesday so I’ve no excuse for missing Dave McNary’s 12.21 report about the release date of Guy Ritchie‘s King Arthur movie (technically titled Knights of the Round Table: King Arthur) having been moved from 7.22.16 to 2.17.17. If a downmarket CG action-epic is likely to bomb in mid-July it’s going to bomb just as badly if it opens the following February, so the reasoning behind the Warner Bros. date-shift probably has something to do with needing more time to finesse the CG plus saving dough on p & a costs. King Arthur, in any event, is the new Jupiter Ascending — the Warner Bros. space-fantasy that was initially slated to open in July 2014 but was bumped to February 2015. 2015 has really been a banner year for Warner Bros. — an all-but-certain loss when Ritchie’s pic opens, Jupiter Ascending has lost well over $100 million, Pan (which I didn’t even bother to see) having lost between $130 and $150 million and Ritchie’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. having lost a bundle also. Things could turn around next year with Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad and Fantastic Beasts, but who outside of fanboys is honestly looking forward to seeing the latter two?

I was just thinking that it’s a shame that Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow‘s De Palma, a five-years-in-the-making documentary which screened in Venice and New York last September, won’t be screening at Sundance ’16. Every Christmas I get a little hungry for fresh watchable movies, knowing full well that I won’t have this satisfaction until I hit Park City, which isn’t for another three and a half weeks.

I initially assumed that the beautiful mountaintop avalanche that Leonardo DiCaprio witnesses during the final third of The Revenant was digitally created. Then I read in a 12.22 N.Y Times interview with director Alejandro G. Inarritu that it was entirely real. David Segal writes that Inarritu “is known for exasperatingly high standards and fiendishly complex stagings, which in this movie included a helicopter-induced avalanche that had to be perfectly timed with several actors and a horse.” Not quite — just Leo and a single horse share the shot. A helicopter triggers an avalanche, one presumes, by hovering over virgin snow at the top of a mountain and thereby pushing loads of the stuff off a cliff. Another way to have done it would have been to fly a physical effects guy to the peak and have him detonate an explosive. A seriously impressive feat by any standard or measuring stick.

A 12.25 N.Y. Daily News story reported that this 12.20 video of an Indiana woman, Eva Goeb, experiencing an emotional meltdown upon catching sight of Lily, a newly-adopted granddaughter, had attracted almost 4 million viewers. Right now the count is at 4,464,053.

The occasion was a surprise holiday visit by Goeb’s son Donny, a military officer stationed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickham, and his wife Miranda.  The couple hadn’t told Goeb they’d managed to adopt and decided “hey, let’s surprise her!”  I’ll never understand people who go to all lengths just so they can watch friends or family members go into shock when the big moment happens. Donny obviously succeeded in this regard, and perhaps with a secondary motive. The YouTube page announces that Donny is looking for gofundme assistance to get through “over $30,000” in adoption costs.

HE reaction: It’s very nice that an infant girl has been adopted by good parents and that grandma is overwhelmed, etc. But my first reaction was to feel sympathy for Lily. Imagine her feelings of shock and perhaps fear as Goeb, obviously a practiced emotional showboater, shrieks and slobbers. In my eyes Goeb is the kind of gunboat mom who will suffocate you with affection and attention, and who will always insist that her feelings be exhibited to the max and therefore known to the world (or at least to the neighbors).

“The Revenant is an experience I’ve never had before. It’s totally its own beast. This is not a movie for sissies. It’s beautiful, fierce, immersive, delirious. Submerged in ice, arctic air, brutality and a kind of artful oppression. An ordeal of blood, agony, survival, snow, ice water, wounds and steaming horse guts. Great cinema is not always easy to absorb because it often challenges. It can sometimes feel hard or difficult, gnarly, awesome, almost too much…but it almost always sticks with you.”

This was my first reaction, posted 32 days ago, to Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s immersive masterpiece. The word is out on this puppy — great but no day at the beach — so I wonder how many will be going to see it today. It’s certainly no Christmas heartwarmer. But cineastes will go, of course, especially those who have as little affection for Christmas as I do. Please share your reactions and report about how crowded the room was, and what the vibe felt like on the way out.

From Alan Scherstuhl’s Village Voice review: “What’s been missing for years in Hollywood’s adventure films? Verisimilitude. Correspondent with the rise of computers and the ability to show us any place that filmmakers can imagine, has been the fall of immersiveness — that sense that the actors are in a place you can’t go yourself, rather than just standing against a digitized mock-up of one.

I’m not coughing as much today — that’s something. And I don’t feel as achey. But it’s still a struggle to get up and get some water out of the fridge. I’ll try to eat something but then I’ll lose interest. A friend told me to order a couple of quarts of chicken soup, but I haven’t touched it since it was delivered last night. I slept for 12 hours straight, if you want to call it that. Illness is a jailer. It’s incredibly boring to just lie here, but at the same time I can’t seem to make myself do anything else. Even watching a film seems too demanding.

On top of everything else the thought of not posting anything is terrifying. My whole life rests upon this daily endeavor.

The last time I felt this weak and poisoned was when I caught a fever during Sundance ’08, and it took a major Herculean effort to force myself to sit up and write something about the death of poor Heath Ledger, whom I knew very slightly. 

“So sorry you’re ill,” a friend has written. “Drink gallons of water. Try and get high alkaline water. It kills bacteria in the system. Whole Foods will have Essence water 9.5 or Essentia water 10. Pavilions has Alkaline water 8.5. And in the mainstream Fiji is the best high alkaline at about 7.5. It will cleanse, purify and clean out your entire system. Gallons! (At least buy distilled water if you can’t get alkaline.)

I tried to watch Orson Welles‘ Chimes at Midnight in a Manhattan repertory cinema (the Carnegie Hall Cinema? The Thalia?) in the late ’70s. But the black-and-white photography looked like shit, and the sound — poorly recorded and not even synched at times — drove me crazy. And Welles’ performance as Falstaff struck me as overly boisterous and taken with largeness (cackly voice, exaggerated gestures). This plus the fast, crazy-quilt cutting and the feeling of this splotchy, under-budgeted film having been stuck together with chewing gum…it was just too much.

About 30 minutes in I decided Chimes at Midnight was the second most unpleasant Shakespearean film I’d ever sat through (the champion being Peter Brook‘s black-and-white King Lear with Paul Scofield), and so I bailed. “Good riddance,” I told myself.

But I’m certainly willing to give it another go when a restored, properly sound-synched version, courtesy of Janus Film and the Criterion guys, appears on Bluray sometime in ’16. On second thought I can’t see buying the Bluray (my initial experience was too irritating) but I’d go if Chimes plays at a niche venue in Los Angeles. The film will screen at NYC’s Film Forum January 1st through 12th.

The illness continues. Hacking cough, a hint of fever (aching muscles), some chest congestion but not too much, mostly half-sleeping the sleep of the disturbed.  Exhausted, agitated — in the grip of a kind of lazy, languid paralysis. Late yesterday afternoon I picked up some antibiotic pills, an inhaler and prescription cough syrup so things might improve in a day or two.  But not presently.  I waited two or three hours this morning to swallow my second antibiotic pill — the thought of getting up seemed way too strenuous. All I want to do is hibernate. Even watching a movie all the way through takes too much effort. Last night I was watching The Limey on my Macbook Pro but I fell asleep at the 45-minute mark.

Email #1 from film critic pally: “Definitely have that cough looked at, and ask the doc about possibly getting an inhaler along with the antibiotic pills. Sounds like you have exactly what I had, which hit me the day after TIFF ended. Eventually became bronchitis verging on pneumonia, which settled so deeply in my chest, it took two bouts of antibiotics and two sets of inhalers (first time in my life I’ve used them) to finally knock it out. Didn’t feel terrible, just had a really nagging cough.”

Email #2 from film critic pally: “I hope you saw a doctor today and got things analyzed. Two years ago I picked up something on the plane back from New York. It progressed exactly the way you described and I finally went to see my doctor (I hardly ever get sick either). It was initially a bronchial thing but by this time had progressed to something worse. The doctor said if I hadn’t come to see him and do something about it, who knows what would have happened. It was the most debilitating condition I’ve ever experienced. Took weeks to feel 100% again.”

“The old Most Dangerous Game/The Naked Prey man-stalking format is uncomfortably imposed on a Mexican immigrant narrative in Desierto, a sharply made but simplistic second feature from writer-director Jonas Cuaron. Psychology and motivation don’t concern director Cuaron here, just the physical spectacle of the hunter and the hunted. If the story is meant to represent a microcosm of the immigration problem, it’s woefully reductive. If it’s meant to be first and foremost an action thriller, it does have a few nice moves to offer, especially in the climactic mano a mano between the two men on large rock outcroppings that involve risky maneuvers, precarious positions and long drops.” — from Todd McCarthy‘s Hollywood Reporter review, posted on 9.13.15.